Literature & Music

Joseph Brodsky- Love

Twice I awoke this night, and went to the window. The streetlamps were a fragment of a sentence spoken in sleep, leading to nothing, like omission points, affording me no comfort and no cheer.I dreamt of you, with child, and now, having lived so many years apart from you, experienced my guilt, and my hands, joyfully stroking your belly, found they were fumbling at my trousersand the light-switch. Shuffling to the window, I realized I had left you there alone, in the dark, in the dream, where patiently you waited and did not blame me, when I returned, for the unnaturalinterruption. For in the dark that which in the light has broken off, lasts; there we are married, wedded, we play the two-backed beast; and children justify our nakedness.On some future night you will again come to me, tired, thin now, and I shall see a son or daughter, as yet unnamed — this time I’ll not hurry to the light-switch, norwill I remove my hand; because I’ve not the right to leave you in that realm of silent shadows, before the fence of days, falling into dependence from a reality containing me — unattainable.